


Dreams & Nightmares

by ourladyofmanycats



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Daisy is sneaky, Dreams and Nightmares, Female Friendship, Gen, Mentions of Fitz, Mentions of Will - Freeform, Nightmares, Not Beta Read, One Shot, Short & Sweet, Someone help, Space Angst, Why can't I stop writing angst?, potentially canonical, probably not awesome, the lighthouse, totally platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 12:05:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13434363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ourladyofmanycats/pseuds/ourladyofmanycats
Summary: Jemma curled up against the cold mattress she had been assigned. Beside her, in the servants’ quarters, five other women lay still in the dark. She wished for a window. If she could focus on the stars, she might get away with escaping for a while.Jemma wakes from a nightmare and Daisy can't sleep.





	Dreams & Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE help me stop writing angst, folks. If you find a typo or inconsistency, please let me know. I'm looking for a beta reader and thinking of writing something a bit longer, by the way :)

It wasn't the same nightmare every time. Sometimes, Will was ripped from between her arms again, a horror followed by the sound of his scream. A piercing shout in the middle of the night. Time couldn’t erase her memories of Will. He was there in her brain to stay, for her subconscious to pick up and wave in front of her face and remind her that she might have saved him.

 

More recently, the nightmares were of Daisy’s face corrupted with rage and the quaking feeling of the world pulled apart beneath her feet. She didn't plan on telling her in the brief moments they shared between tasks. She could picture the hurt in Daisy's eyes if she ever mentioned the light curiosity/concern that the rumors could be true. The thought gave her flashbacks to the weeks following terrigenesis, when Jemma had been finally, completely alone.

 

There were the dreams about Fitz as well. Sometimes he was the doctor and sometimes the scientist. He was a chimera who wore more than one face, each of which oscillated around the other and seemed to live to terrify. Those were the nightmares that woke her up in the dark, her heart beating faster than a hummingbird. She sometimes swore that she could feel the heat of his hands wrapped around her throat. It felt like she swallowed her tongue. Maybe, she wondered, she had. 

 

In this world, the one that she woken up in, Fitz was surely dead. 

 

Jemma curled up against the cold mattress she had been assigned. Beside her, in the servants’ quarters, five other women lay still in the dark. There was no telling if all of them were asleep or if they dreamt at all. There were no guards to keep the women inside, only the threat of their implants buzzing and shocking them with pain. It was enough, in any case, to keep them tucked in their beds and quiet. Compliant. There was an invisible fence and they were all dogs and the hardware kept them all from barking.

 

She wished for a window. If she could focus on the stars, she might get away with escaping for a while. She could imagine instead the life that she and Fitz might have had, just the two of them. 

 

Her parents, she realized, must have died long ago. A sharp pain stabbed her stomach. She had never returned her mother’s call. It was the same quiet concern that shook her hand on Maveth.

 

Jemma’s lip quivered. She tried to take a deep breath, and failing, forced it out with a shudder. Nightmares at home had been much easier to endure. She missed the feeling of twisting her hand into the soft material of Fitz’s sleeping shirt and the way he woke and held her or else pulled her closer in his sleep. 

 

_ There must be a way out of this _ , she thought to herself. He had crossed space for her--and she would cross time for him in kind. She would dash his words when he said that it was impossible to do it. Jemma wiped the tear from her eye, glad that the golden paint she was forced to wear wouldn’t smudge under her eye. Who was to know what Kasius would do if the image was marred? 

 

Was she to wait? She wondered. Would she wait for Daisy to act or steal a gun or would Coulson and May come to their aid or maybe, they could sneak out into some passageway and run. To where? 

 

She doubted she could sit helpless again, but she was certain she could do no more waiting.

 

* * *

  
  


Down a very long hall, but not so far away, Daisy was lying awake in a nicer room in a nicer bed that she would have lit on fire at the very first chance. Scratch that. She was good enough to light a fire in there with nothing but the furniture. And Daisy knew her limits. They would hold that over her if she couldn’t eliminate every Kree in the lighthouse, and she knew she couldn’t. Not fast enough, anyway. 

 

She had never wished for her powers more than at that moment. Surely, everyone thought she was the end of the world, and she might have shown them if Kasius hadn’t turned that damn inhibitor on. More than she would ever admit, she missed most of all the way that her body felt when it was wrought with energy. She missed the power. Daisy missed the way that it made her feel like she was herself again. 

 

It had been a while since she had felt that emptiness that followed her through her childhood. The realization ripped her in two; that feeling was reborn in her.

 

As an insult to injury, it was hard to sleep in such a comfortable bed when she was used to the tough mattress that was the floor of her van, even the dingy and flattened thing that was in her room back at the old compound--not as if it existed anymore. There was no going back to that, and maybe that was what was best, a sign from the universe that there was no going back.

 

Daisy got out of bed and turned on the light. Didn’t matter how much sleep she got; she wasn’t going to wake up well rested. She wasn’t going to wake up back in the zephyr curled up on the floor. There was nowhere to go back to, not unless she carved it out of reality with a metal spoon. 

 

Without her powers, there was no metal spoon. She couldn’t shoot her way out of a bag with no gun--she couldn’t quake the lighthouse into pieces even if she wanted to. And she kind of wanted to.

 

It would do Daisy some good to see that smug blue face crinkle in fear. 

 

There wasn’t much to do in the night, though. She paced and balanced and wished that she’d asked May to teach her how to do tai chi. One foot in front of the other, she walked a straight line toe to heel and wondered how far down the hallway she could get before someone noticed her. And she liked to bend the rules.

 

She was quiet enough by then, and sneaky. Without the bulk of her clothing, it was easy to slip silently down the hall poised on her tiptoes. She passed room by room, most of which had closed doors. There might be a weapon in there somewhere, she mused. Probably not something she had ever used before, but she was a quick learner. Just the thought made her smirk.

All at once she remembered Jemma. 

 

Daisy stopped, turned on her heel, and headed in the direction of the servants’ quarters. Even if she wasn’t able to talk to her, she could mime to her, write the words out with her finger or something.

 

The corridor was empty, and Daisy mused that they must have felt invincible to believe that they didn’t need to protect themselves. The blue woman probably slept at the foot of her master’s bed. 

 

Once she found the room, she crept in and scanned the faces of the sleeping servants. She’d seen most of them around at some point when they brought in trays of perfectly-shaped fruit and vegetables. If they weren’t carrying pitchers of water, they were drawing her blood and waiting behind Kasius for another order. She couldn’t slander them because she could see the fear in Jemma’s eyes when they were in the room together.

 

At the very back of the room, Daisy found her friend. With a sigh of relief, she fell to her knees and crawled in her direction so that the were eye to eye. When Jemma saw her, she sat up straight in the bed. 

 

“I know you can’t hear me,” Daisy mouthed.

 

“I’m so glad to see you,” Jemma whispered, almost too low to hear.

 

A smile spread across Daisy’s face. “I am too.” She finally realized that it was the truth. There they were in the middle of space floating around, and as unlikely as it was, they were there together. She wrapped Jemma in a hug. 

 

“I’ve been having nightmares,” she whispered.

 

Daisy pulled back so her friend could see her face. “We’re living in a nightmare, so it’s a little harder to escape than waking up,” she said as she took a seat on the edge of Jemma’s bed. 

 

“What about you? How are you?”

 

“I just can’t sleep.” 

 

Jemma grimaced. No good deed went unpunished. So they were there to save the world and suffer until that happened. Nothing out of the usual. 

“Keep your head in the game. We’ll think of something.” Daisy mouthed with a fake smile that she hoped Jemma couldn’t place. 

 

Jemma touched her forehead to her friends and met her eyes. They were quiet for no longer than a minute, sharing through osmosis. “I’ve known you since you were Skye; don’t think you can pull one over on me.” She smiled.

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
